


Into Fire and Into Ice

by RurouniHime



Series: Purgatory [2]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Altered Mental States, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Injury, Crank Newt (Maze Runner), First Time, Fix-It, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hearing Voices, Injury Recovery, Insanity, M/M, Major Character Injury, Newt is trapped in his own head, Safe Haven, Survival, The Death Cure Spoilers, The Flare, The Maze Runner Spoilers, The Scorch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-21 02:54:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16151051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: There’s a Thing in his head.(Newt's POV)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to The Second Kingdom, and is Newt's POV of the same general time frame. You don't need to read them side by side, but having read TSK first will probably make more sense of this one.
> 
>  **WARNING:** Some fairly ugly thoughts because Newt has a Crank in his head.

**I.**

 

kill.

 

_kill_ him.

 

kill this bastard kill him kill him _kill him_

he’s going to kill you.

he’ll cut your throat while you sleep.

don’t sleep.

he’ll wrap his hands around your throat and squeeze and squeeze and _squeeze_

he’ll saw your fingers off one by one and eat them. he’s hungry, look at him, he’ll roast your fingers over the fire like tasty little tots.

cut your fingers off first. all of them before he can get to them.

that’ll show him.

kill him.

 

kill him kill him killhim _killhim_ KILLHIMKILLHIM _KILLHIM_

 

kill him before he kills you.

 

     He won’t.

 

he will. he’ll eat your brains. he’ll dig his fingers in through your eyes. he has such long fingers, look at them. he’ll scrape his nails all the way to the back of your skull, scratchety scratch.

 

     He would never harm me!

 

but he did.

didn’t he?

the maze was his fault, your leg was his fault, and alby and ben and chuck and winston. his fault, his fault, his fault.

kill him. _kill_ him.

 

     Alby…

     Alby. Ben. Chuck. Winston. 

     AlbyBenChuckWinstonAlbyBenChuckWinston

      _Tommy?_

 

     Tommy. _Run._

 

KILLHIMKILLHIMKILLHIMKILLHIMKILLHIMKILLHIMKILLHIM

     Tommy, for the love of god, RUN RUNRUNRUN—

~tbc~


	2. Chapter 2

**II.**

 

     It’s dark.

     It’s so fucking dark in here.

     Salt. On his tongue. He has a tongue. Salt, like oceans. Blood. Tears.

     Where is he? Where is the world, where is the sun and the sand, why can’t he see oh no, go away, no nononono—

take his teeth out and hang them from your ears. better yet, chew them up. push them into your gums. more teeth, more chomp. bigger bite. bite him.

he’s starving you, you know.

     He’s not. He fed me, I can taste it, can’t you taste it, can’t you—

HE WILL EAT YOU HE WILL SPLIT YOUR BONES AND PICK HIS TEETH look he’s eating right now. he’s stealing our food, get in there and get it out, get your thumbs into his mouth, rip it open, reach down there and _get_ it—

     Shut up! Shut up shut up, just

 

     There’s a Thing in his head.

 

he’s a killer, look at him. he murdered it. with a rock. smacked it on the head. that’ll be you. he’ll take that rock and crush your face. why’s he keeping you around? he’s crazy. we’re alright but he’s _crazy._ he’s crazy crazy. been in the sun too long. kill him. pulp his head. it’s already mush in there anyway, isn’t it?

 

     It’s… dark.

     Thomas.

     His tongue moves. He can’t speak. Or he can’t hear. Ears? Yes, still there.

     God, he’s thirsty.

 

     He screams sometimes.

     “You should have just shot me! You utter coward, _why didn’t you kill me?”_

this is his fault, you know.

     “This is all your fucking fault!”

     He screams, but he never understands anything he hears himself say.

 

     Wet! Shit, shit, shit, water!

he’s trying to drown you, don’t you see his game, kill him, _kill him,_ KILL HIM

 

     Tommy?

     Tommy, where am I? Can you hear me?

     Is that even you?

 

     Please. _Please_ don’t leave me.

~tbc~


	3. Chapter 3

**III.**

 

     He’s not thirsty today. Not hungry either. He opens his mouth but all he hears is buzzing, ringing. Still doesn’t recognize the words if he speaks.

     The Thing stays away.

 

     Tommy?

     Everything hurts, like razors all over his skin and inside him, like blood pouring back into numbed limbs.

     He grits his teeth. Closes his eyes tight against the sun. He opens his mouth and he speaks, again and again.

     Tommy.

 

he’s the reason you’re like this.

     No. He’s the reason I’m free.

 

     Smell. 

     He can _smell._

     Dry iron. Ozone. Burning and smoke and old death.

     New death, sometimes.

 

     God, he knows that _voice._

     The ringing drops back behind it, purring along like an alarm. Words, meaning, are still beyond him, but the voice.

     The voice.

 

     He hears coughing. Doesn’t feel it.

     Something’s wrong.

     Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

     His mind scrapes over a name.

     He’s tired. It never works. He’s _tired._

     But he opens his mouth again anyway. 

 

     The voice answers.

“…Newt.”

 

      _His_ name is Newt. Isn’t it?

you don’t have a name, you’re going to die

     Shut up! SHUT. UP.

~tbc~


	4. Chapter 4

**IV.**

 

“Tommy,” he says one day, out loud. And he hears it.

He understands it.

 

“Tommy.”

The voice: “Yes.”

It’s hot. He’s been here before. His ears buzz loudly.

The voice: “…ou’re the one leading.”

“But where are we?”

The voice: “Come on. You know I don’t know that.”

 

They walk.

Newt walks. Tommy, though, Tommy trips, staggers, bends over and hacks into his sleeve until he can breathe again.

Newt keeps trying.

“Tommy?”

Nothing.

“Thomas. Answer me.”

Nothing.

His eyes burn and his throat fills, and he’s _so sad,_ fuck, he’s— “Tommy, _please.”_

Thomas doesn’t answer.

 

Newt comes loose with a snap, a shroud yanked away. Light spears through like blades and he inhales, deep and loud and all the way into his toes.

“Oh god.” His voice creaks. Everything’s dry, gritty with sand, and the wind rushes so hard it nearly knocks him down.

Scorch. He’s in the Scorch.

He coughs, clears vile tasting gunk from his lungs. Searches for the Thing and doesn’t find it. Gone? Or still buried in the murk?

He has to get it out. All the black, all the goo. It’s still inside him, it’s—He drops to his knees—he was standing?—and hacks into the dirt but the sound is not so familiar. He remembers hearing coughing before, a ghost-memory, but it didn’t sound like this. Not him coughing then. Someone else was coughing like their lungs were tearing, someone—

He turns, scrabbles around and looks into the sun and sees—

“Tommy?”

~tbc~


	5. Chapter 5

**V.**

 

_Day one_

“Tommy.” He crawls to him, grabs his hand. “Tommy?”

Spiderweb. No, no, that’s not right. Another word: black, green, veins, Thing, no, oh, no. He wrenches up Thomas’s sleeve and he sees why the Thing is gone from his head, because it’s moved into Thomas. “No, _Tommy.”_

Thomas is immune. Thomas is _immune,_ how, how did this happen? Did Newt infect him? He claws at Thomas’s clothing, his lungs shrunken and straining, heartbeat bashing against his skull, each blow an eruption of pain, but there are no bites, no wounds save for a cut on Thomas’s arm and a… 

Mess. A godawful mess on Thomas’s belly, covered over with gauze. Newt freezes.

Did he do this? Bile swims up his throat, as sour as rot. He had a gun, once; the cold weight of it still hangs in his hand. Did he, did he…?

No. God, no. He would never shoot Tommy. He’d sooner shoot himself.

“Tommy? Thomas.” Thomas’s skin burns. His brown eyes are reddened round the edges, bloodshot, unfocused when they open, and his chest jumps with each heave for air. Newt pulls Thomas’s shirt collar wide, away from his throat. God, how did they get here, where are they? There’s nothing out here, just sand and dust.

Thomas’s chest rattles. Newt grabs his face in both hands. _“No,_ breathe. Breathe, come on.” Something; there has to be something. He casts around, dizzy and sick, and there, a bag. When he pulls it toward himself, he hears a familiar, glorious clinking.

He grabs a bottle. His eyes swim.

_He can’t read this._

The rattling deepens, into tender lung tissue.

Thomas is dying.

Newt breaks. “Tommy! You can’t just leave me here, you bloody shank, I don’t even know where we are!”

Oh god, what is he going to do? There’s no one here, nowhere to go, just sand and death and a broken Earth. He’s useless, he’s useless to Tommy, can’t breathe, he’s going to lose him, he’s going to hold Thomas while Thomas slips right out of his grip—

“Newt?”

He comes down with a bang, tilts to the earth, and grabs Thomas’s face again. Thomas is speaking, yes. There’s focus in those eyes at last. “Tommy?”

Thomas’s fingers climb over his, hot, shaky. They squeeze. “M’sorry.”

His eyes roll up white and his hand drops away.

No. No, no, _no, “Tommy!”_

 

_Day one_

He makes himself read. Erythromycin. Cephalexin. Tobramycin. Tazobactam.

“Okay. Okay.” His hands shake like he has palsy. He can’t keep still. “Syringe. Did you bring syringes, you— _yes,_ Tommy, yes, you beautiful—okay.” He kisses Thomas’s face, then sits up. Seizes his own wrist, and makes his hand go fucking still long enough to draw the dose.

 

_Day one_

The Thing is in there. Inside Thomas. It carves ugly lines under bloodless skin.

“Thomas is immune.” He is. Brenda proves it. So what’s happening?

His mind is a blank.

“Exposure!” Of course. No shelter. No food. No water. Correction, little food and water. Newt remembers eating. He remembers thirst, and then later, not being thirsty. His tongue is an anvil in his mouth. Thomas’s immune system is compromised, by the elements, by the lack of nutrients. He needs to drink, and eat, so his body can fight this again.

Canteen. Newt finds it. It weighs down in his hand. It sloshes. “Alright.”

He talks out loud, afraid of the silence. In silence, the Thing always came. He hasn’t heard it for days, but he can’t truly believe it’s gone.

“Drink, come on. God, I can’t even lift you.” Under him, get, get under… “Okay. Okay, here—okay. Now I’ll drink. We’ll do this together.” Escape together, run together, rescue together, live together, even _die—_ “No. No, we’re not doing that, you’re not doing that. Come on.” Thomas’s body is so warm, a living blanket against his front. “Come on, you shank bastard, you gonna leave me now? After everything?”

He blinks up into the searing sky, sees black feathered shapes circling overhead. He needs to get them out of this sun.

 

_Zero hour_

Thomas. God, _Thomas._

What made him? What made this boy, that he would come back for everyone?

For Newt?

 

_Day two_

The crows are relentless. In the end, Newt just wraps the canvas sheet loosely around them. It billows and sucks in the wind and every day—are they days? He has no idea—he has to climb out and stagger through the sand and find something to eat.

It _bleeds_ him. The first time, he collapses after ten feet. He crawls back when he can, wraps himself around Thomas, and cries because they are going to die.

The second time, he brings back insects. Beetles, big and glossy, with shells his quaking hands can barely crack.

The third time, a lizard, and later, he sits in the sun until he gets hold of a crow.

 

_Day five_

At night, with the wind tossing around them, he whispers to the Thing.

“Leave him alone.” Thomas barely moves except to breathe, but… “Don’t talk to him. Don’t you say a fucking word to him. You hear me? Don’t you ever say the shit you said to me. Leave him be.”

Maybe if he talks long enough, steadily enough, Thomas won’t hear the Thing.

 

_Day six_

He says his own name aloud, a reminder. In case he forgets again. The shape of it is soft and familiar against his palette. “Tobramycin and erythromycin, Newt.”

Mary’s voice echoes in his head, ages ago, lifetimes ago, in a tent tending to Brenda while she slept. _Tobramycin and erythromycin, Newt._ Her voice is low, slightly hoarse, so beautiful compared to the Thing’s, compared to his own cracking throat. _Not for the Flare. Only the serum can touch that. But for opportunists. Tricky little bugs that creep into the lungs._

On the sixth day he lifts Thomas’s sleeve and the spiderweb has shrunk.

“Oh, god. Oh, yes.” He presses his lips to the skin of Thomas’s wrist and shuts his eyes.

 

In the dark: 

“Please. Please don’t leave me.”

 

In the dark:

“I can’t lose you. Not you.”

 

_Day seven_

He chafes Thomas’s limbs: his fingers and toes, his too-hot ears, the end of his nose. He doesn’t think. His hands just start doing it; slouched there in their makeshift shelter, he chafes gently and he waits out the sun.

“Come back to me.” Over and over, barely a whisper now, the shape of strange words. The rest, the—

      _I need you. Tommy. I lo—_

—stays silent, locked inside him. This is all he can say anymore: “Come back to me.”

 

_Day eight_

Thomas’s fever spikes. Burns so hot. Newt can’t breathe.

The hours crawl by like Cranks in the dark.

 

_Day nine_

“Newt.”

He jerks up, and his spine aches, his head swims, but there, there… “Tommy.”

He can’t not touch. The sweat has dried from Thomas’s brow. His skin is cool, it’s _cool,_ his eyes are clear, golden brown again. Thomas shudders, full bodied, and seizes him, arms and legs.

“Ow, ow, Tommy—” Only, the pain is bright and sharp and beautiful. It’s perfect. Thomas smells of sweat, dust, fever, and he, no, wait, no—he lets Newt go. 

Newt grabs him back, both hands, shaking and shaking, breathing the same air.

“How,” Thomas manages, the word pulled into a knot, _“how.”_

Newt tugs him in, and has no answer for him.  
   
~tbc~


	6. Chapter 6

**VI.**

 

Every day is a day. He doesn’t care to number them. Every day now, Tommy is awake and alive.

He finds words again. Part of him cannot believe he’s talking, to Thomas, curled into a canvas bubble on the wind-battered Scorch. It’s a trick. Has to be. But Thomas moves and draws his eye, breathes and draws his thought.

Thomas is _alive._

“I could see things. See you. I yelled and yelled but…” _The Thing. The Thing shouted me down._ His throat wrenches tight. He can’t bear to ask if Thomas ever heard its voice. “You never seemed to hear.”

Describing Thomas’s illness aloud… Newt is a dried-out husk. He belongs in this desert, he should not have enough moisture in him to cry, but it floods his eyes and tracks his cheeks with salt. He did this. He must have passed the Flare on, who else could it have been?

“You shouldn’t have stayed.” Thomas’s eyes are cavernous. “What if I’d turned?”

Newt feels far too thin, translucent, and yet Thomas can’t seem to see that at all. “I’ve already been to hell.” He looks into Thomas’s eyes, again. Can’t stop. It fists around his heart, that Thomas doesn’t understand. “Nothing you could do to me would be worse than that.”

He has never kissed, not that he remembers. Yet he has imagined it, this press of mouths, of breath. Faceless, until it wasn’t, until it never could be again. Until it was all he had left, the only thing he still kept back, that the Thing could not get hold of, but would eventually. Oh, it would.

Thomas smells of the ghost of sickness, but he tastes fresh and untouched.

 

He takes his letter back.

The necklace is heavy in his hands, the weight curdling his uneasy gut. He wants to throw it far away, until the sand devours it. He wants to press it close to his chest, until it disappears under his skin, until his body swallows up the words again. 

But he has them memorized; he will never unlearn them.

He remembers the fragile paper. The broken end of the pencil between his fingers, the dirt under his nails from scrounging the pencil out of the dust in Gally’s curtained off alcove. The letter reminds him of clotting lungs, trembling hands, veiny wrists. Teresa. Anger. Sharp city lights. The reek of death dragging up behind him. 

Of all the holes he has in his head, why, why can’t this be one of them?

“Read it to me?” Thomas asks.

He can’t. Not now, but maybe… “I’ll do you one better.”

“Oh?” Thomas’s eyes are warm in the flickering of the lighter’s flame.

“I’ll tell it to you. But not yet.”

Thomas watches him, silent.

“Sleep now,” Newt says, throat welling, unable to look any longer. He blows out the flame.

 

newt

     Oh god.

neeeewt

     God, no. No. You’re dead.

 _you’re_ dead, look at you.

     He looks. His arms are black, the skin cracked, the tips of his fingers falling off. The light stabs like a knife, and all around him is a barren waste, no life, not even crows, just bones and bones and bones sticking up out of the sand like bleached teeth. He feels his face, but there’s no nose, no ears, just holes in his head, full of flies. He can see, but he has no eyes.

look what he did to you.

     He’s not breathing. Oh god, there’s no heartbeat in his chest. Not real. If he talks, if he can just say it out loud— “It’s not real.” The wasteland ripples. Newt feels his chest expand a little, cool, clean. Real is Thomas. Real has always been Thomas. “Tommy found me, he _found_ me.” 

peekaboo. i found you.

     No. No. “Damn you to hell.”

yes, exactly. remember? you’d follow him anywhere.

     He opens his mouth. His throat burns shut on the searing air. He can’t breathe.

not your first. likely to be your last.

     Shut up. _He can’t breathe._

watch for it, your perfect moment. when the sun hits the bones, here it comes.

     Tommy? Tommy, help me.

he did this. he will again. the future is in his hands, it was always in his hands.

     Stop lying! _Stop. Lying. To me._

fine. 

     Fine?

if you won’t kill him, i will.

     Tommy, Tommy, T—

 

“—ommy, Tommy, _Tommy!”_

The canvas smacks into his face, blocking oxygen. Someone flattens him into the sand, a leg cinched over his waist, arms locked around his chest. A heartbeat thunders through Newt’s back. 

“Newt! Newt.”

Oh god, his voice. His _voice._ Newt hears sound, animal noise, coming from himself. 

“Wake up.” Thomas’s breath against his ear. Thomas’s face against his neck. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

Newt jerks, turns. Can’t get his fingers to work, to grab or to hold, and the light is too bright, and Thomas, Thomas—

“Is this real?” He buries his hands in what he can: clothing. Thomas’s smell hits his nostrils and he gulps it in, musky with old sweat and dust. He can’t even recognize his own voice. “Tommy, is this real?”

And the answer comes: “Yes,” pressed to his temple. “Yes, yes, yes.”

Newt breathes.

 

They lie in the dark, and then morning comes, bruised plum light that is no respite. Newt listens to Tommy breathe. In, out. In, out. In, out.

He can’t shake the sensation that he’s half dead. Rotten, festering somewhere inside.

God, how can he not be? He can feel the tracks and the scars and the char marks the Thing has left, hatching up his insides, crisscrossing all over his lungs and heart. He sees faces in his head but he can’t find the names to match, though he knows that he loved them. Loves them. He remembers Brenda, Frypan, but there’s another boy, a boy whose dry smirk makes Newt choke with gratitude, makes his throat fill and his bad leg ache, and he can’t remember why and he _cannot remember his name._

Doesn’t know if that boy is dead or still alive.

Thomas is alive, though. God, Thomas. Thomas came back _for him,_ even though Newt stabbed him, tried to kill him. This... feeling. This time there are no words because Newt never knew any. It’s indescribable. It’s the Scorch, constantly tearing itself apart, sand covering over everything only to be whipped away again by unrelenting wind.

He’s going to burst. His breath is coming too fast, his heart slamming through his breastbone. His body is half numb, only half here. He tangles his fingers with Thomas’s, squeezes so tight; he knows Thomas is behind him, understands the logic of it, but he can’t _feel_ it. What’s really holding him here anyway? He’s going to drift away, he’s going to slide into nothing, disappear under sand.

He’s dust in a shape that won’t hold, and he can’t tell what is nightmare and what is real. The canvas flaps, a dirty wing, and beyond it the landscape scrapes on forever, nothing but brown and decay. How would Newt know what’s real? Are they still dreams if he’s already dead?

His mouth shapes the word: _Tommy._ His anchor, a tether to this world. He can’t get it out.

Sand chokes his throat. He needs to feel. He needs to feel Thomas feeling. Maybe the Thing is already telling Tommy that none of this is real either. That Newt’s not real. If Thomas stops believing—

He moves their hands before he realizes, nails tickling down his belly over thin skin, bumping across his ribs. Every drag, every scratch, is an explosion of color behind his eyes. He shudders, curls his shoulders until his back stretches, and when he pushes their hands beneath his own trousers, Thomas gives a weak gasp, a hot puff over Newt’s nape. His fingers seize between Newt’s in the humid cradle of his pelvis. Another shock of color rips through him, searing a hole through the veil.

Newt _has_ to see him, now, now. He turns, squeezing Thomas’s hand, breathes against Tommy’s lips until it’s not breathing anymore, it’s blood and heat and life, Newt’s entire body waking in a prickly rush. He kisses Thomas, kicks aside the canvas and scrambles on top of him, and Thomas arches off the sand, fisting the back of Newt’s shirt so tightly he shakes. 

“Tommy.” 

The smell of him surrounds Newt. Tommy’s hands drag Newt’s shirt up, slide down his bare and sallow skin, and then one freezes just over his heart. 

Thomas shudders, fingertips to toes. He mashes his nose against Newt’s chest, and Newt is suddenly aware of how very hard he himself is breathing—he’s _breathing,_ god, against all odds, somehow he’s still—and then Thomas makes a new sound that yanks the last of the fog away with brutal hands.

He’s crying.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas croaks through tears and dirt into the skin of Newt’s chest. “M’sorry.”

No. What has Tommy to be sorry about? It’s not right. It’s the farthest from right, farther than the Maze or the Scorch, because Tommy is here, bleeding heat into Newt’s once-frozen body, giving and still giving, and it hits Newt like a brick straight to the heart: at some point very soon, there will come a time when Thomas has nothing left to give anyone.

He can’t let that happen.

“You came back for me.” _Don’t you see?_ Even now, the event is monumental; any other person, any other circumstance, and it never would have happened. But Tommy came back. “You…” Everything spasms. He clutches tighter. “You came back…” 

Thomas hauls him down, then around again until Newt’s back presses solid to Thomas’s front, Thomas’s hand splaying over the side of Newt’s throat, and Thomas’s mouth pliant on his. 

 

Kissing Thomas is water. It’s ice, oxygen, soft and liquid light. Pressure, right where he’s been pushing and pushing, silence where he’s been screaming. Thomas tastes, every time, of sand and salt, rust, thirst, hunger, exhaustion, and Newt can’t get enough. If Tommy is thirsty and hungry, he’s _alive._ If he’s exhausted, he’s _awake._

God, he’s everything. He’s real. He’s always been, since the moment he wriggled free of Newt’s grasp in the Glade and flung himself into the Maze. Every time, he threatened to take ‘everything’ away from Newt, and every time, he ended up bringing ‘everything’ back.

Kissing’s not going to be enough. There’s something rattling in the hollows left in Newt’s core, humming just beneath his skin. Eventually it will pummel its way free.

For now, though, he kisses. He kisses Tommy.

He wakes up. He lives.

 

The radio goes on.

Four days of a special kind of silence. And then—

_“Thomas?”_

Thomas is asleep, hollow-cheeked and openmouthed, his breathing labored from the constant sun and sand and dry.

_“Thomas, please. This time… please…”_

Newt fumbles the button with numb fingers until it clicks. “No, it’s… Brenda, it’s me.” His eyes immediately begin to sting.

Static. The Scorch holds its breath.

 _“Newt?”_ Shaking, disbelieving.

A clatter, a buzz and a whine that makes Newt wince. Beneath the canvas, Thomas twitches, and Newt squeezes his arm. Then another voice, sending up spatters of light in Newt’s innards, even though the name still escapes him: _“You… Is, is that really you?”_

“He came back for me.” He’s sobbing, quietly. Can’t stop crying. “He came for me. Like you did.”

The other voice is crying, too.

 _“We’re coming,”_ Brenda says. _“Where are you?”_

“West. Of the city.” The spires still smoke, broken bones on the horizon. Newt wipes his face and cradles the radio. Searches for the right words. “Look for the…broken bridge. Sticking out of the… of the…”

_“Newt?”_

“Tommy’s sick,” he rasps, suddenly full up with it and spilling over. Thomas is so very pale. If not for the nasal whistle of air from his mouth and nose, he would look dead. “He needs— _We_ need help.”

 _“Stay where you are,”_ says the nameless boy, sending more heat threading like a ghost through Newt’s veins. _“We’re coming to you.”_

 

**Epilogue**

 

He didn’t think air could be this humid, this full of water. It’s heavy in his lungs and it coats his throat, and the forest smells sweet and sickly, of fermenting, rotting things, but it’s not the same as the Scorch at all. It’s swollen and overripe. It’s life, life everywhere.

Lying there in the healing tent, regaining strength, it eased inside him. Introduced itself. Now, twenty days later, it sucks to his flanks when he works in the cornfield, drips down his spine when he goes for water at the stream, clamps over his nape when he thwacks wood together with Gally’s hammer. At night, it doesn’t cool down to frigid like in the desert or blow out to sea. It hangs there, close up against his skin even in the hut he’s been given, until he peels off his shirt and trousers just to get away from that sticky cling. 

Tonight, the twentieth night, sweat beads Tommy’s collarbone, makes the side of his throat shine, and the waves crash, loud enough to drown thought. Newt blinks up at him, close in the darkness, skin sliding together, Tommy’s hands shivering over his ribs. 

He’s never done this before. He…doesn’t remember doing this before, with Tommy or otherwise. He’s glad it’s dark because one of his thumbs is this gray thing now that hangs there off his right hand or tucks weirdly against his palm, the skin of his chest is too fragile, streaked with the horror of the Flare, and his ankle still burns where Tommy’s hand closed around it today and shook, fond, but his toes are all a limp colorless mess. He swallows, thick. He doesn’t want Tommy to see. Any of it.

He kisses Tommy’s mouth when he can, strains up, listens to the creak-creak of the cot and gasps in hard, out harder, tries not to make more noise. They’ll all hear, he thinks ridiculously, of course they will. Idiot, how could they hear? Outside is deafening, the hiss and gush of water over the sand, the heady buzz of insects in the trees, the croaks and hoots and trills. They, he and Tommy, have no rhythm, just Tommy’s fingers threaded with his, grip and release, and their bodies slipping together, awkward on the cot, but… Oh god, he’s on fire, he’s going to, to—in mere _moments,_ but it drags and drags at his insides and his heart is lodged in his throat, and Tommy’s mouth touches his over and over, half-kisses. Breath shared. Newt shudders. There’s nowhere to go but up. He twists a leg around the back of Tommy’s, imagines he can still clench his toes. His entire body’s coming to life at once, just _filling_ with heat: pooling in his pelvis and his chest, a storm in his throat, flowing over when he tries to speak, when he manages half of Tommy’s name. Clean, relentless, living heat.

Tommy’s hand rests against his cheek, cradles his jaw. His palm is damp, his thumb presses hard to the corner of Newt’s mouth—Tommy’s eyes squeeze shut, then open again, dark in darkness.

Newt stares straight into them.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from _Inferno_ by Dante Alighieri. A fantastically horrifying text.


End file.
